


And I Want You Only

by rikyl



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: F/M, episode AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 02:06:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1051266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rikyl/pseuds/rikyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an AU version of You've Got Sext where Mindy doesn't mention Cliff right away when they're talking over breakfast. I just thought it'd be fun to prolong the misunderstanding and see where that led.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And I Want You Only

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to everylastline and diaphenia for reading and making suggestions. Title from Thunder Road again, because it's my go-to Danny-loves-Mindy song ( _Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays/Roy Orbison singing for the lonely/Hey that's me and I want you only_ ).

Something felt so right about making breakfast while Mindy read the paper, with her little comments and whatnot, wearing his pants and smiling at him like that. With her sitting at his kitchen table, Danny could picture what it would like to be with her in a way he’d never been able to quite wrap his head around before, and he wanted it. 

And she felt the same way as he did—he just had to speak up, and they could have mornings like this, and all the rest. He took a deep breath. Now that he knew how he felt, it was best just to get it out there, to broach it head on, like a man. 

“You know that guy you were telling me about?” he started. “The one you work with. I think you should know he's not out of your league. You’re great.”

“That’s very nice of you to say.”

“I mean it,” he said, wanting her to catch the full import of what he was saying. He walked over to serve her some more French toast, and she caught him by the arm. 

“I love that you said that.” Mindy smiled sincerely at him, holding his arm for a few seconds. His skin felt warm from the contact, adding to the glow of hopefulness he felt this morning. He waited for the confession that was coming, waited to see her face light up and to feel her in his arms again, for real this time.

Instead she turned back to her plate, putting another big forkful in her mouth and savoring it. “Well, we’ll see what happens.” She shrugged slightly, looking unconcerned, and kept eating and reading the newspaper.

Danny watched her, slightly confused. _See what happens_ , what did that mean? He thought he just had to say something, and that’s how the something would happen. But nothing was happening. He was just standing here, watching her eat toast.

“So that’s it, that’s just … okay. You’re just going to keep eating your toast there?”

She squinted at him slightly. “Yeah, I’m sorry, did I not thank you for making me breakfast? Thank you. It’s so nice to have a guy cook me breakfast and not have to worry about what it means for our relationship status, you know? And I’m so impressed you have syrup, even if it’s not something normal like Mrs. Butterworth.” She squinted at the bottle. “What is this weird—”

“That’s _real maple syrup_ ,” he said automatically, his mind racing around some of the words around the middle of her rambling. What did she mean, relationship status? She wasn’t worried? What relationship status? She had slept in his bed, she was wearing his clothes, and she was eating his toast, did that all add up to some kind of specific status in Mindy’s head that didn’t need to be acknowledged out loud? Did she think he was already clued into it? 

His heart sort of leapt at the thought that their status, whatever it was, was already in progress, as ambiguous and improbable and ridiculous as that was. But whatever the case, why was she being so casual about this? It felt like nothing was changing, and this was supposed to change everything.

Mindy set the syrup bottle back on the table. “Whatever, this is really good.” She smiled at him again, but in a _thank you for breakfast_ kind of way not in a _thank you for having this conversation about our feelings so we can be together_ kind of way. He wandered back to the stove to make himself look busy while he tried to regroup.

“So what do you mean, see what happens?” If he had felt casual and confident a moment before, he was faking it a bit now. “What’s going to happen? I mean, what do you want to happen?”

“Oh, you know, the usual,” she said, without really looking up from the newspaper. “We get married and have lots of genetically gifted babies, with mom’s personality and dad’s metabolism, and live happily ever after like Coach and Mrs. Taylor. Where will we live, though? On the one hand, I can’t imagine leaving Manhattan, but on the other hand, what kind of place is this to raise your kids? I saw a penis on the train to work yesterday. I mean, not _just_ a penis, it was attached to someone, but you know what I mean. What do you think? Are you okay, Danny?”

Danny was coughing, trying to clear or at least cover the sudden seizing of his throat.

He cleared his throat a few more times, gathering his composure. “Yeah, um … hold on, I just got a little something in my …. Yeah, that’s um … that’s just a lot more than I was expecting. At this early date. You know. Ahem.” He coughed again, trying to wrap his head around this. He knew she wanted kids, and yeah they were getting older—but he’d just come around on the toothbrush thing, and did kids use toothbrushes? Did they have their own? It was just a whole lot to think—not that he hadn’t thought of that too, in passing or whatever, but—

“Oh, that’s just the fantasy version, the stuff I think about at the beginning of any relationship. You meant, like, what now? I don’t know, I was thinking maybe I’ll wear something extra sparkly, stand close on the elevator, wink a lot, that sort of thing. Or do you think I should make a move, something more obvious? I don’t know if guys like it when you’re too obvious.”

“Guys like that!” Danny blurted, louder than he intended. “Obvious is good. Be more obvious, please. Although I don’t even know why this is necessary. If we feel the same way and all. Maybe I didn’t make that clear enough before, that’s what I was trying to say. But I don’t know, we’re adults here, we know each other already, so we should, we should just…”

He trailed off, swallowing hard. She was staring at him, her mouth agape, and he could see a bit of chewed-up toast on her tongue. He didn’t even care.

“We should just…” she echoed his unfinished sentence faintly. “You, wait, we should what?”

She looked more freaked out than he had expected, and somehow that made him feel calmer again. So she was nervous, so was he—this was going to be okay. A little more awkward at first than anticipated, but they’d get past that, probably.

“For starters,” he said in a lower voice, “you should, er, swallow. And then maybe you should stand up because this is weird standing over you. Or I could come down there, but maybe you should just stand up.”

He wondered if it was obvious that he was thinking of the logistics of kissing her. He wondered if she was thinking about it too. That was what was supposed to happen next, right? That’s what this whole conversation had been building toward obviously.

It felt like an eternity, with Mindy looking everywhere but at him and finally, hesitatingly, pushing her chair back from the table. She looked so uncertain as she was rising that he instinctively stepped toward her encouragingly.

“I think maybe I should—” she started saying but stopped abruptly when he caught her hand in his. She looked down at their hands, before her eyes shot up to meet his, wide and startled.

That’s when the words started tumbling out, words he hadn’t realized he was going to say.

“It’s not just because I’m lonely. I don’t want you thinking that.” They were standing so close now, and he smiled, feeling so glad they were finally doing this, even as her eyes kept darting around like crazy. She looked completely overwhelmed, Danny thought, at finding out he returned her feelings. He squeezed her hand reassuringly and brought his other up to caress her upper arm. “I’ve thought about this a lot, not just since you said something last night. And I want this too. I think you’re great. I think we could be great. I know we fight sometimes and I don’t know, maybe it’ll be complicated, but it’s like you said, we’ll figure it out!”

“Whoa. I was talking about buying a country. It was hypothetical, it was ridiculous, Danny, I was just reading the paper and saying stuff, I didn’t mean—”

“Maybe it’s not ridiculous, though!” He slipped his arm around her waist, and when she looked down at it, he leaned forward to nuzzle his face into her hair, dropping a kiss there. It just felt natural to do it. He lowered his voice next to her ear. “So we’ll figure out how to share Greece. Stranger things have happened.”

She bent her head back sharply, but her face was still close to his, and her eyes looked huge. He felt a little dizzy staring into them from this close vantage point. “Are you being serious now, Danny?”

“I mean, I don’t really know why we’d want to buy Greece,” he murmured. “Italy has the pope. What does Greece have?” His eyes kept drifting to her mouth. “But yeah. I’m serious.”

“Greece has … a lot of old buildings, I think.” Her voice was quiet and a little shaky.

“Italy has a lot of old buildings too.”

“You should see India’s,” she said inanely.

It was dawning on Danny that they should have kissed by now, but they hadn’t. She wasn’t moving away, but there was something about the slight stiffness of her body in his arms, the persistent uncertainty in her wide eyes, and the general lack of Mindy-level enthusiasm about what should have been, in his mind, a reasonably romantic moment. It was keeping him from leaning in and just doing it. This wasn’t going as expected.

What if she hadn’t meant him? Who else could she have meant? He racked his brain and came up with no one. But he suddenly had the worst feeling that he was about to find out he’d just been the biggest fool of his life.

Pushing the thought down, he searched her face, looking for indications that they were in the same place. “This is what you want, right, Mindy?” His voice came out hoarse, and to his slight mortification, a little pleading sounding.

She didn’t immediately say anything, but her forehead creased, and she squinted at him, and his heart fell like a brick as he started to pull back from her. “Okay. Okay. If you don’t—”

“Shh! Shh!” she hushed him urgently, catching his arm in her hand so that it stayed around her, if stiffly so. “Just … give me a minute, okay?”

She looked a little frantic, and he had no idea what was happening. “Okay …”

“This is sudden, Danny. This is big. You can’t just spring something like this on a woman like you’re Kanye in a baseball stadium. I’m completely unprepared. One minute we were just having this nice little breakfast scene in your kitchen, I’m reading the paper to you and you’re cooking for me and saying nice things, and all the while I was thinking—”

Mindy clamped her mouth shut suddenly, alarmed. 

“Thinking what, you were thinking about what?” Or who, he was afraid to ask, because at this point he wasn’t so sure it was him anymore.

“Never mind.” She gasped theatrically, throwing her hands over her mouth. “I was going on about _marriage_ and _babies_ , and you’re still here, you’re not halfway to Omaha by now?”

He was utterly sweaty and flustered now and couldn’t tell if the direction this conversation was going was more encouraging or humiliating. If she didn’t want him, she’d have left by now, right? She wouldn’t just be here taunting him. Would she?

“I, well, yeah, no, it was a little much, but you’re _you_ , and like you said, you always think ahead like that …”

She grinned and pushed her hands against his chest in glee. “You have it _bad_ for me, Castellano! You want to have my babies!”

“I don’t want … I mean I don’t not want … I just …” Deep breath. It’s not like he could walk it back at this point, and at least this couldn’t get any worse. “I want to make breakfast for you, okay? And I want you sitting there in the morning chattering at me. And I want you in my bed at night and kicking me on the couch and jumping into my lap when the movie gets scary. I want … I just want …”

Her face had completely changed while he was talking, suddenly softer and more serious and a little awed. “Oh my God,” she said more quietly. “You really have it bad for me.”

He shrugged miserably. “I guess I do. But if you don’t—”

Before he could process what was happening, she had thrown her arms around his neck, her body relaxing against his at last, and his arms flew around to catch her there. And then she was kissing him.

 _She_ was kissing _him_. Mindy Lahiri was kissing him, as passionately as she did everything else, and he tried to let his doubts fly away from him as he wrapped himself up in her and kissed her back, his whole body buzzing with the feel of her and the knowledge that she wanted him after all, even as everything about how this had transpired was suggesting otherwise.

He knew he should let it go and just focus on this that was happening right now, his fingers tangling in her long silky hair, the feel of her soft curves pressing against him. But it was nagging at him, and he wanted against all logic to hear her tell him that he’d been right all along, that there was no one else, it was only him.

“So the guy,” he finally let slip in between kisses. 

“What guy?” Her hands cupped the sides of his head and she angled her head to kiss him more deeply. 

“The guy,” he broke the kiss enough to say, “from work, the one you said you had a crush on.”

She drew back slightly. “Oh, the guy! It was you! It was totally you the whole time!” It was too manic, and he could tell she was lying. Before he could call her on it, her face fell into a guilty pout. “It was someone else,” she admitted sheepishly, trying to draw his mouth back down to hers as if they could just keep going like this, but he couldn’t.

He stepped back from her, and they stared at each other for a few moments as this awkward information hovered between them.

“Who?” he couldn’t help asking.

“Just some guy.” She looked a little miserable over having to address this. “In our building. Not a doctor.”

Danny looked away from her and squeezed his eyes shut. “Do you want to be with him?”

“I don’t know. No. Yeah, I did. But it’s just a crush! Nothing has happened, and I don’t know if anything would happen. It’s not like …”

She paused, and he forced himself to look back at her, warily.

“I like the way your pajama pants fit me, and I don’t even know if he wears pajamas,” Mindy blurted.

“So keep the pants,” Danny said, frustrated.

“It’s not just the pants,” she said with a hint of desperation. 

He looked at her doubtfully, still feeling wounded and less and less sure this was going to work. Maybe he should just tell her to go. This wasn’t supposed to be this difficult.

Just then she stepped forward and took hold of his arm, surprising him. “Danny,” she said softly. She tilted her head and looked at him with serious, earnest eyes, the kind that could melt the Rangers' ice. “The close personal friendship we already have, that’s real. That hot kiss we just had? That was real, and I don’t know about you but I’d like to go back to that part as soon as possible. Maybe I wasn’t seeing it before, but I’m intrigued, and I want to see where this is going and how many more nice things you’re going to say to me and what else you know how to cook. Are you really going to let the fact that I thought some other guy was cute for five minutes ruin whatever this is?”

“You thought the kiss was hot?” he said, softening a bit.

“Smokin’.” She smiled flirtatiously at him. “Have you been cooking in this kitchen? Because it is _hot_ in here.”

He laughed in a little in spite of himself. “I have been, actually. I made you breakfast. Okay, okay, I guess you’re right. I just got a little …” he shook his head, wanting to just put it behind him rather than have to talk it out any more. But he didn’t know how to get back from this awkward place to where they had been a few minutes ago. “So … what now then?”

Mindy shrugged cutely, leaning against the breakfast table. “I think you said something about wanting to see me in your bed?”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “I said that?”

“You said _a lot_ of things.” She slid her arms around him, and he let himself lean into her again. 

“I suppose I’m going to hear a lot about those things.” He didn’t even mind if she was going to look at him like that and talk about being in his bed.

“Maybe later,” Mindy murmured, and she started kissing him again.

A few minutes later, he hitched her legs around his hips and carried her out of the kitchen, the breakfast dishes forgotten.


End file.
